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the Ten Heavenly Stems (was Re: Accumulator naming)

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  the Ten Heavenly Stems (was Re: Accumulator naming) Kragen Javier Sitaker <kragen@canonical.org> - 2026-09-11 16:07 -0300
    Re: the Ten Heavenly Stems (was Re: Accumulator naming) Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson <johann@myrkraverk.invalid> - 2026-09-14 01:12 +0800
      Re: the Ten Heavenly Stems (was Re: Accumulator naming) Kragen Javier Sitaker <kragen@canonical.org> - 2026-09-14 14:40 -0300
        Re: the Ten Heavenly Stems (was Re: Accumulator naming) quadibloc@invalid.com (John Savard) - 2026-10-26 03:00 +0000

#117962 — the Ten Heavenly Stems (was Re: Accumulator naming)

(People reading this may find it sufficiently off the wall as to wonder
if an LLM wrote it, but I assure you that I wrote it entirely with my
organic brain, and Emacs, looking stuff up with Firefox.  I write the em
dashes with the Compose key.)

jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> writes:
> It's easier, at least for me, to make a “mental map” of where things are
> when they have names rather than numbers, even if those names are
> short. It's easier to recall “watermellon”, “apple”, “grape” than 39,
> 23, 5 even though both sets are decending in magnitude.  [...]

In English, Hebrew, Greek, etc., the obvious alternative to numbers is
to use letters of the alphabet: register A, register B, register C, etc.
In Chinese, of course, there is no alphabet, but, as I understand it (my
Chinese is mostly limited to reading datasheets), the Ten Heavenly Stems
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavenly_Stems> and Twelve Earthly
Branches <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthly_Branches> are used in
much the same way.  This may not be adequate for a processor with many
architectural registers like RISC-V’s 32 (or 31) or MMIX’s 256, but it’s
close enough.

The Ten Heavenly Stems have mostly lost their original meanings over the
last 3000 years and been relegated to mostly only this use.  I have
listed them here with their origins; where they have other current uses,
I have put them in parentheses:

1. 甲 turtle shell (methyl, “armor”)
2. 乙 fish guts (ethyl, “twist”)
3. 丙 fish tail
4. 丁 nail
5. 戊 halberd (Firefox’s translation neural network translates it as “E”)
6. 己 thread on a loom (“self”)
7. 庚 evening star (“age”)
8. 辛 to offend superiors (“spicy”)
9. 壬 burden
10. 癸 four-handled plow

I am amused at the idea of moving a 36-bit quantity from register
Eveningstar to register Fishtail, but I think that might be a bit of a
hard sell.  Of course, in Chinese, the names are just one syllable.

The Twelve Earthly Branches are used, among other things, for two-hour
periods of the day, and they have a conventional correspondence with the
Chinese 12-year zodiac symbols, which I have placed in square brackets.
They were used to name the days of a 12-day week 3000 years ago.  The
zodiac symbols are not the meanings of the characters, which, as with
the Heavenly Stems, have largely lost their meaning over the last few
millennia.

1. 子 child [rat]
2. 丑 ugly, clown [ox]
3. 寅 [tiger]
4. 卯 [rabbit]
5. 辰 day [dragon]
6. 巳 [snake]
7. 午 noon [horse]
8. 未 not yet [goat]
9. 申 to state or explain [monkey]
10. 酉 unitary [rooster]
11. 戌 army [dog]
12. 亥 [pig]

The zodiac symbols seem like they would greatly improve the memorability
of one’s assembly code and calling conventions — it would be much easier
to learn that the stack pointer was the Pig register and the link
register was the Dragon register than to learn which one was r14 and
which one was r15.

Kragen

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#117993

On 12/09/2026 3:07 AM, Kragen Javier Sitaker wrote:
> (People reading this may find it sufficiently off the wall as to wonder
> if an LLM wrote it, but I assure you that I wrote it entirely with my
> organic brain, and Emacs, looking stuff up with Firefox.  I write the em
> dashes with the Compose key.)
> 
> jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> writes:
>> It's easier, at least for me, to make a “mental map” of where things are
>> when they have names rather than numbers, even if those names are
>> short. It's easier to recall “watermellon”, “apple”, “grape” than 39,
>> 23, 5 even though both sets are decending in magnitude.  [...]
> 
> In English, Hebrew, Greek, etc., the obvious alternative to numbers is
> to use letters of the alphabet: register A, register B, register C, etc.
> In Chinese, of course, there is no alphabet, but, as I understand it (my
> Chinese is mostly limited to reading datasheets), the Ten Heavenly Stems
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavenly_Stems> and Twelve Earthly
> Branches <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthly_Branches> are used in
> much the same way.  This may not be adequate for a processor with many
> architectural registers like RISC-V’s 32 (or 31) or MMIX’s 256, but it’s
> close enough.
> 
> The Ten Heavenly Stems have mostly lost their original meanings over the
> last 3000 years and been relegated to mostly only this use.  I have
> listed them here with their origins; where they have other current uses,
> I have put them in parentheses:
> 
> 1. 甲 turtle shell (methyl, “armor”)
> 2. 乙 fish guts (ethyl, “twist”)
> 3. 丙 fish tail
> 4. 丁 nail
> 5. 戊 halberd (Firefox’s translation neural network translates it as “E”)
> 6. 己 thread on a loom (“self”)
> 7. 庚 evening star (“age”)
> 8. 辛 to offend superiors (“spicy”)
> 9. 壬 burden
> 10. 癸 four-handled plow
> 
> I am amused at the idea of moving a 36-bit quantity from register
> Eveningstar to register Fishtail, but I think that might be a bit of a
> hard sell.  Of course, in Chinese, the names are just one syllable.
> 
> The Twelve Earthly Branches are used, among other things, for two-hour
> periods of the day, and they have a conventional correspondence with the
> Chinese 12-year zodiac symbols, which I have placed in square brackets.
> They were used to name the days of a 12-day week 3000 years ago.  The
> zodiac symbols are not the meanings of the characters, which, as with
> the Heavenly Stems, have largely lost their meaning over the last few
> millennia.
> 
> 1. 子 child [rat]
> 2. 丑 ugly, clown [ox]
> 3. 寅 [tiger]
> 4. 卯 [rabbit]
> 5. 辰 day [dragon]
> 6. 巳 [snake]
> 7. 午 noon [horse]
> 8. 未 not yet [goat]
> 9. 申 to state or explain [monkey]
> 10. 酉 unitary [rooster]
> 11. 戌 army [dog]
> 12. 亥 [pig]
> 
> The zodiac symbols seem like they would greatly improve the memorability
> of one’s assembly code and calling conventions — it would be much easier
> to learn that the stack pointer was the Pig register and the link
> register was the Dragon register than to learn which one was r14 and
> which one was r15.
> 
> Kragen

You can add to this list a few hieroglyphs.  There are a little over se-
ven hundred in the standard /middle egyptian/ and you can see most of
them at the back of Gardiner's book.  Well, probably all of them in the
most recent edition.

They started to get inventive in the new kingdom, and I never learned
any of those.

My hieroglyphs are currently too rusty to suggest any specific one for a
register, but you'll be amused to know the characters stand on /reg-
isters/ in hieroglyphic artwork.  By that I mean the pictures of the
gods and pharaohs.

After some two hundred years, Egyptologists are still arguing about what
some of the ideograms are, and I suspect some of these academic flame
wars are still on-going.

I've added alt.history.ancient-egypt to this discussion.


Happy original research, and participations in ancient academic flame
wars!
-- 
Johann | email: invalid -> com | http://www.myrkraverk.com/blog/
I'm not from the Internet, I just work there. | via Easynews.com
https://bsky.app/profile/myrkraverk.bsky.social | for ( ;; ) _:;

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#118019

Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson <johann@myrkraverk.invalid> writes:
> On 12/09/2026 3:07 AM, Kragen Javier Sitaker wrote:
>> jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> writes:
>>> It's easier, at least for me, to make a “mental map” of where things are
>>> when they have names rather than numbers, even if those names are
>>> short. It's easier to recall “watermellon”, “apple”, “grape” than 39,
>>> 23, 5 even though both sets are decending in magnitude.  [...]
>> In English, Hebrew, Greek, etc., the obvious alternative to numbers
>> is to use letters of the alphabet: register A, register B, register
>> C, etc.  In Chinese, of course, there is no alphabet, but, as I
>> understand it (my Chinese is mostly limited to reading datasheets),
>> the Ten Heavenly Stems <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavenly_Stems>
>> and Twelve Earthly Branches
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthly_Branches> are used in much the
>> same way.  [...]
>
> You can add to this list a few hieroglyphs.  There are a little over se-
> ven hundred in the standard /middle egyptian/ and you can see most of
> them at the back of Gardiner's book.  Well, probably all of them in the
> most recent edition. [...]

Is there a sequence of hieroglyphs that is conventionally used as
ordinals in the way that the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches are?

Kragen

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#118830

>> On 12/09/2026 3:07 AM, Kragen Javier Sitaker wrote:

>>> In English, Hebrew, Greek, etc., the obvious alternative to numbers
>>> is to use letters of the alphabet: register A, register B, register
>>> C, etc.  In Chinese, of course, there is no alphabet, but, as I
>>> understand it (my Chinese is mostly limited to reading datasheets),
>>> the Ten Heavenly Stems <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavenly_Stems>
>>> and Twelve Earthly Branches
>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthly_Branches> are used in much the
>>> same way.  [...]

Also, for numbering things 1 to 1000, Chinese sometimes uses the text
of the Thousand Character Classic. One example of this is the use of
the first *eighty* characters from the Thousand Character Classic for
a game essentially equivalent to Keno.

John Savard

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